Hacker News Reader

Comment by netbioserror | Hacker News Reader

The engine monopoly point has been kind of stupid for a while now. Blink is open source. It's a stable target. It's not vendor-locked. There is no problem with it having a monopoly, and I am sure the industry can decide to fork it or start over if the leadership goes absolutely cuckoo. When it comes to good open source projects, we WANT to be converging on that one leading project and ensuring it's the best it can be. If Mozilla got their team to work supporting Blink and integrated it into Firefox, we'd probably all be better off.

View on HN

Google is constantly inventing new JS APIs. Some websites adopt those, which then breaks the site for all other browsers. That's good enough reason for everyone to avoid Blink.

> Google is constantly inventing new JS APIs

like what?

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/android/android-4.0/e...

that's specific to chrome

also it's weird argument "constantly inventing new js apis"

so what? their usefulnesss should be determined in their own context, not by the fact that they're a js api; unless you're a child who wages weird programming language culture wars on the internet and thinks anything that isn't the language they use is inferior

Mozilla could contribute to Blink, but that would not help it prevent Blink from adding e.g. Web Environment Integrity ("DRM for the web"), or other additions that are user-hostile. Being in control of an engine gives way more sway over that engine.

This is why browser diversity is where the action happens. Firefox and Brave can just nix the DRM components. Similar to how Brave itself or Ungoogled Chromium cut down Chromium's telemetry components. One engine underneath, many interfaces and options for power users and the concerned. We all save on the extremely hard work of building an entire other browser engine, and then expecting the whole industry to support it.

We would absolutely not be better off. Engine monopoly is harmful to security. When you have an exploit for the only engine, all users are at risk. If there was even just 3 engines with comparable market share, that would increase the costs for attackers, and make it easier for people to switch if their current engine is compromised.

The fact that Blink is open source is totally irrelevant; sure it may mean that some niche browsers can exist with a few tweaks, but any serious attempt at forking would require a legion of developers.

If Microsoft isn't able to maintain their own browser, the idea that some other org out there is going to have the resources to fork it is laughable.

I would not use the "we" word with quite that much confidence.

You are essentially arguing that a monopoly position in this particular industry minimizes what is known as "welfare loss". That would be quite an exceptional claim, IMHO

This in general only happens within market areas that appeal to the formation of so-called "natural monopolies" - typical examples being water, postal services, electricity, and the like (utilities). The rationale being that the monopoly formation in this case spares society as a whole for excessive costs as these industries are characterized by a very high proportion of fixed costs (infra, machinery, ect) relative to variable costs.

With browsers it seems that on the contrary the overwhelming majority of development costs are indeed variable (man hours) which -- all else equal -- would support the assumption that competition in this market would be better for society as whole, and that a monopoly here would be a loss for society (and eventually it would fall).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com